Varghese Mathai and his research regarding SARS-CoV-2

Varghese Mathai holds a post-doc research position at Brown University. He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His skills and expertise include fluid mechanics, turbulence, experimental fluid mechanics, and multiphase flow and he has been involved in 48 published articles. Since Mathai does a lot of research with fluids, I felt like his work is very relevant to what we are learning about in class.

I also find Mathai's research interesting, particularly his most recent research, because it has to do with how airflow in cars can lead to the spread of diseases, such as SARS-CoV-2. The article he published, titled Airflows inside passenger cars and implications for airborne disease transmission, (December 2020), used computer simulations in order to determine airflow patterns inside of a car when windows were open or remained closed. They found that when more windows were open, there were less particles exchanged between a driver and a passenger as a result of air flow patterns, which could reduce disease molecules from passing between them. This implicates the ways in which certain types of air flow can limit the spread of disease between two people inside a car.

This research is extremely interesting to me because it combines concepts that we are looking at in class right now, diffusion and the motion of particles (and even fluids), and applies them to relevant questions regarding the spread of disease.

Reference: “Airflows inside passenger cars and implications for airborne disease transmission” by Varghese Mathai, Asimanshu Das, Jeffrey A. Bailey and Kenneth Breuer, 4 December 2020, Science Advances.